Scientists try to decode plant-killing microbes

Andrew Bridges, The Associated Press

Published 10:00 pm, Friday, October 18, 2002

LOS ANGELES -- Scientists in California and Virginia will try to decode the genetic makeup of two plant-destroying microbes, including one blamed for killing tens of thousands of oak trees along the West Coast and one that may soon imperil the Northwest's Douglas fir.

Backed by $4 million in federal grants, the scientists hope to sequence the genomes of the two species of Phytophthora. The most notorious of the pair is P. ramorum, which causes Sudden Oak Death syndrome.

With the genomes in hand, scientists expect they will be able to develop the means to track, detect and, eventually, treat the diseases.

P. ramorum has killed tens of thousands of black oak, coast live oak and tan oak trees in northern California and southern Oregon since it first appeared in 1995. This year, scientists discovered coast redwoods and Douglas fir are also susceptible, as are at least 14 other plant species.

Scientists at the Walnut Creek laboratory and at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute in Blacksburg, Va., will sequence at the same time the genome of P. sojae, a related microbe responsible for soy rot.